How is it that the most exciting thing about Warcraft in 2024 is old Warcraft games from the mid 90s? I can’t have been the only one watching the Warcraft Direct broadcast this week hoping for a glimpse of the future, and of something new – to hear what director Chris Metzen has been doing since he returned to think about the future of Warcraft a year ago. Instead, all we got was remastered versions of Warcraft 1 and 2, and Classic servers for World of Warcraft Classic – Classic and a tease for player housing in WoW. That was as good as it got: player housing, which, admittedly, is exciting, but it’s still a niche development for a 20-year-old game. How many people, besides WoW players, are excited to hear about WoW expansions in 2024? They have become as predictable as winter.
Ironically, all the Warcraft Direct did was remind me how exciting Warcraft to be, which I know is partly the point of a 30th anniversary broadcast, but isn’t it also about setting up what’s next? We used to hang on Blizzard’s every word, eager to see what it had been making for us. Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3 – the latter rewrote the rules of the RTS. Then of course there was World of Warcraft, which really did seem to captivate the world. But how long has it been since it can claim to have done that? It’s telling that the most exciting thing to happen to WoW in recent years was the launch of Classic, five years ago. The future seems to have become about reliving the glory of the past.
It’s not just Warcraft that’s tiring. Look across Blizzard more broadly and ask, “When was the last time it gave us something new?”, as in actually new, not Warcraft Rumble new. Diablo 4, as much as I enjoyed it, wasn’t much of a surprise. Do we really have to go back to Overwatch in 2015 to find the answer?